Whitewash: On Keith Windschuttle's Fabrication of Aboriginal History

Already, the debate over Australia's colonial past seems inevitable. Here was a white Australia that had begun to call its national day Invasion Day; that danced to Yothu Yindi's call for a treaty; that, in the hundreds of thousands, marched for reconciliation, planted seas of hands and signed "sorry" books. In an increasingly conservative political environment, it hardly seemed surprising that a voice emerged to debunk the historical justification for Australia's populist shame.

In his 2002 book The Fabrication of Aboriginal History, Volume One: Van Diemen's Land 1803-1847, Keith Windschuttle resurrected the notions that originally justified colonisation - that Australia was never truly owned by its original inhabitants, that they were too savage to understand such a concept as property, too primitive to organise a war and too vulnerable to survive settlement. He offered not only a colonial frontier without warfare, but asserted that it was an academic conspiracy that portrayed it as such.

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In Whitewash, Robert Manne has edited a collection of essays responding to Windschuttle's book. Manne has gathered some impressive authors. Some offer reflective comment, while others engage directly with Windschuttle's attacks on them. Windschuttle identifies Lyndall Ryan as a key culprit. In her contribution to Whitewash, Ryan explains that mistakes in the end notes of her book The Aboriginal Tasmanians occurred when some references were accidentally placed out of order. Her other misdemeanours include mixing up the names of colonial newspapers and mislocating one massacre - "minor infractions", asserts Ryan, "certainly not 'fabrications"'. She is right to ask: "Who, pray, is the real fabricator?"

Henry Reynolds shows how Windschuttle "operates a system of filters" in his use of historical evidence. It is through a filter that he asserts the Aborigines in Tasmania "did not own the land". Windschuttle's only evidence for this claim is that the Aborigines "didn't have a word for property". Reynolds lists the many sources Windschuttle disregarded, including Tasmanian Aboriginal words for "my country" - clear evidence of a territorial claim.

Two welcome inclusions in Whitewash are the Aboriginal voices of Peggy Patrick and Greg Lehman. Lehman, a Tasmanian, explains how "truth" and "facts" of history-telling are secondary in Aboriginal culture to the notions of respect and trust.

Nowhere has Windschuttle more notably disregarded these concepts than in accusing Patrick of fabricating her story of the Mistake Creek massacre. Windschuttle said it was not possible that Patrick's mother was killed in 1915. He misinterpreted Patrick's Aboriginal English: "mum mother" means grandmother, not mother. "Bad enough this terrible thing bin happen," Patrick tells us. Worse that Windschuttle "make big shame for me all over".

Throughout Whitewash, we are reminded of Windschuttle's dispassion. He counts the dead but is unmoved by their passing. He concludes that 118 Aborigines were killed on the Tasmanian frontier. Mark Finnane, employing standard social science methodologies, concludes this death rate was proportionally three times higher than that of Australian soldiers in World War I. He wonders why Windschuttle, whose work demonstrates the violence of the colonial frontier, "evades his own conclusions".

Perhaps the weakest point in Whitewash is A. Dirk Moses's concluding chapter, in which he compares Windschuttle to the Holocaust denier David Irving. This is neither helpful nor relevant.

Australians have remembered Tasmania as the bloodiest chapter in their colonial past. My research has unearthed stories told in Tasmania of a horrific frontier. One person, in 1908, described the island as a "land soaked in blood". But Windschuttle continues an Australian tradition of justifying and silencing colonial injustices. This tradition runs deep only because there is so much to justify, and so many voices to silence.

Rebe Taylor is the author of Unearthed: The Aboriginal Tasmanians of Kangaroo Island (Wakefield Press).